EDIBLE NOTABLES BREAD OF LIFE

For celebrated chef Ron Mendoza and company, the path to breadmaking enlightenment was not a straight rise

BY MARK C. ANDERSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY PATRICK TREGENZA

Yes, this is a story about breaking bread, but it’s also about breakdowns, and making the best of both.

It’s a story about community and redemption too. And as much as anything, it’s a story about the interplay between simple and fancy. Fancy came first.

From The Floor

Ad Astra Bread Co.’s cofounder and primary flavor maker Ron Mendoza trained at culinary school then leapt into restaurant life wheels up. He was finding fulfillment in competitive skateboarding, then a new passion possessed him. He was working at landmark Los Angeles spot Nick + Stef’s Steakhouse under heralded chef Joachim Splichal when it happened.

The night it clicked: Oct. 13, 1999.

His shift in the kitchen had already stretched long when his managers asked if he’d stick around for a special event. The Council of the Library Foundation would be honoring Jacques Pépin and Julia Child on her birthday.

The menu that night stacked summer white corn soup with lump crab meat, heirloom tomato towers with grilled onion vinaigrette and crispy filet of beef on horseradish potato cakes. Mendoza still keeps a signed copy.

But that’s not what did it for him. Instead it was the toil, teamwork and tasty possibilities.

“Between the sense of energy, the stress of getting the work done, and everyone coming together—and being at the level of a restaurant that created an environment where I could meet and cook food for people like Child and Pépin,” Mendoza says, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do.’”

Something more subtle was at work too. Across a 17-hour shift, Mendoza recognized a familiar element.

“I came from skateboarding culture, where you create a sort of family with a wide variety of people,” he says. “Ultimately you have a group of friends that will teach you technique—in skateboarding, someone will teach you a trick, and with cooking, someone will show you how to break down a chicken—but it’s up to you to learn more. I knew if I pushed myself, I’d get opportunities.”

That he did, eventually traveling to bright-light events across continents, and more immediately jumping across L.A. to Nick + Stef’s higher-end sibling Patina.

Next up was French Laundry. “French Laundry was too structured, too set in their ways,” he says. “I came from a creative place, and I didn’t think that was achievable there. They wanted perfection, not creativity.”

Fortunately celebrated chef-restaurateur Walter Manzke, who knew

Mendoza from Patina, was partnering with David Fink on projects in Carmel, and sought a pastry chef.

“We saw pedigree,” Fink says, “and that the guy is an amazing pastry chef.”

At what would become Aubergine, Carmel’s first Michelin-starred restaurant, Mendoza seized upon greater creative freedom. Soon he found fresh inspiration from incoming chef Justin Cogley, a pro figure skater counterpoint to Mendoza’s skateboarding game.

The resulting plates flirted with the boundaries of reality. Truffles, foie gras, white chocolate and caviar all factored into desserts. Things like frozen cream cheese-tangerine shards, candy cap mushroom puffs and ginger-cookie-wrapped scoops of sorbet—disguised as rocks— took shape.

“I was seeing how far I could manipulate something—with ingredients, technique, flavor,” he says, “spicy, hot, cold, acidic, using vegetables in different ways, making a course look like a forest floor.”

But it didn’t resolve a longing. Alaina Musich, who worked with Mendoza at L’Auberge, and now partners with him on Ad Astra, had a front row seat.

“He was doing that super-conceptual, chef-culture stuff that was so intense and so meticulous,” she remembers. “Something he always said was that he wished he could do that for his friends, or have something to hand to neighbors…and it wouldn’t cost what [a $250 tasting menu] does.”

Chilling Effect

The next chapter started sweet. Then got sticky icky.

Mendoza and Musich found partners to launch something that would be more accessible to friends and neighbors.

Revival Ice + Cream applied Mendoza’s fine dining acumen to things like “bees knees” ice cream with beeswax, honeycomb candy, burnt honey and bee pollen.

“It’s the things I was doing in fancy kitchens, for more people who don’t necessarily have the money for fine dining,” he told me in 2016. “The thought process is the same.”

Revival drew a feverish following. Lines started spilling onto the sidewalk. Almost as quickly, he and Musich discovered they were in an uneven relationship with their investing partner, who has since sold Revival, which continues to be a downtown Monterey destination.

Mendoza is straightforward about it. “There are people who can make things and people who take things,” he says. “It happens a lot in the industry. It’s important to protect yourself, and maintain control and have rights to what you create.”

He didn’t lose the lesson. Call it a blessing served cold.

New Strain

Over the course of a year post Revival, Mendoza thought about his next step, and started drafting a detailed business plan. Along the way, he gravitated toward a foodstuff even simpler than ice cream.

“There’s something about bread that is so raw and stripped down,” he says. “It’s three ingredients: flour, water, salt.”

Fink, after decades in hospitality, offers context. “It’s harder in my opinion to make truly great bread than create a pastry program,” he says. “We all eat at bakeries. What separates the best? It’s technique, it’s passion, it’s the right ingredients, it’s knowing what the dough feels like. Ron’s just really good at making something simple that’s wonderful.”

Mendoza can get philosophical about the elemental role bread plays.

“Every culture has bread,” Mendoza says. “You can live off it. Every day people are getting bread and eating it.”

That said, simple shouldn’t be confused with easy.

“It takes a lot of skill and patience and learning,” Mendoza says. “It’s an art.”

Starter Culture

Ad Astra Bread Co. made its debut in September 2019, as Other Brother Beer Co. opened its doors to a throng of people from across the region.

Lines at Ad Astra stretched a dozen deep opening night and enthusiasm never waned. Not that there weren’t misfires— note bread made with spent grain with rice hulls that ripped up eaters’ throats.

Mendoza was OK with missteps. He entered into the project eager to see what worked, which became clearer after COVID made in-person service a non-starter.

“We decided to go slow and see what happens,” he told Edible last fall. “I didn’t know if bread was going to take off or if we would be a cool eatery. We realized that bread was what we needed to focus on. That’s what we became good at.”

As Ad Astra’s olive sourdoughs, French baguettes and focaccias converted the masses—and restaurants like Stationæry and Wedo’s at Dust Bowl Brewing asked for more rolls and buns—the tight quarters at Other Brother got less tenable.

Mendoza watched his pastry chef trying to scale desserts with a countertop KitchenAid. Racks and racks of loaves cooked overnight swallowed up floor space at the brewery every morning. “We were bursting at the seams,” he says. “We had to tell wholesalers and farmers market shoppers we can’t do more.”

“My team was starting at 4[am], then 3, then 2, then 1, then some came in at 11[pm], just to have everything done and cleaned up before the brewery team got there. Bread elves!”

A new headquarters on Alvarado Street in downtown Monterey, a few doors down from Revival, in the former Bull & Bear, will allow production to level up.

The 2,800-square-foot space (compared to 400 in Seaside) will be mostly kitchen space, with a conservative opening date of late June.

The storefront will feature grab-and-go and sit-and-savor options, with a double queue system to keep movement fluid.

Close Company

Ad Astra comes layered with connectivity as much as anything else.

Layer one: providing something foundational for the people.

“Whatever we do is part of the community,” Mendoza says. “It’s not something for me; it’s what I’m able to give to everybody else, and what the Peninsula wants.

“I’m always telling my team, we want to be community bakers—providing something that on our part is very skillful, but is an everyday thing, not a luxury.”

Layer two: supplying breads to discerning foodie spots around the area, whether it’s the base for avocado toast at Captain + Stoker or the sourdough that sells out daily at Elroy’s Fine Foods.

“I love the idea that our bread transforms from a simple thing to something that’s more elevated,” Mendoza says.“So many people come in and say, ‘I had dinner last night at Bernardus or Salt Wood and we had to get some for ourselves and take it back to Nebraska.’”

Layer three: building culinary IQ by investing in aspiring bakers.

Josie Lewis will run Snack Shack—which replaces Ad Astra at Other Brother—and can speak to the educational part.

“Ron taught me everything I know about naturally leavened breads,” she says. “He’s incredibly collaborative. If you have ideas, he wants to hear them, and he wants you to try them.”

Musich kneads that wisdom into the bigger dough.

Expected to open in early summer, the new Ad Astra bakery in Monterey will allow the business to expand.

“We’re hoping to raise the level of education to make Monterey a destination workplace where people want to learn, with a chef-driven style of committing to product,” she says. “We try to push that edge.”

That ambition also applies to their new storefront.

“There’s a certain execution, atmosphere, aesthetic, cleverness and customer experience you get at good bakeries in San Francisco, Seattle or L.A.,” Musich says, “more of a big city feel. We are trying to bring that level of excellence to this area.”

Which may sound a little—wait, what’s the word—fancy.

Think again.

As Mendoza says, “Here’s this big rustic country loaf of bread, nothing too complicated or overwrought. Tear into it and start eating in your car.”

479 Alvarado Street, Monterey • adastrabread.com